DEMONOLOGY

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) The belief in an intermediate race of beings, between deity and humanity, has been a prevalent feature in almost every popular creed; and all tradition or speculation respcicting it may be said to fall under the general term of Demonology. Among the early oriental nations, especially the Persians and Egyptians, the science of astronomy appears to have been e entially connected with this branch of superstition; tlie heavenly bodies were honoured as daemons or celestial intelligences. This ancient belief appears to have had much influence on the Jewish rabbinical writers; and out of it, connected with what is revealed to us in the Old Testament of the existence and attributes of angels, they framed their peculiar mythology. The Greek word la.iyi.uv, dcemon, is said to be derived from 5a>!,tt*», knowing or intelligent. In the earliest monuments of the language, its signification is vague and uncertain. In Homer it generally signifies a deity: "bot i(jua\iov is anything godlike, wonderful, which may have been communicated or inspired by a deity; but, in the Ody ey, some traces are to be found of the me^ining 325 DEMURRAGE. "fortunate" or "unfortunate" attached to the word. In Hesiod, however, we have an expre mythological account of the daemons, — a§ spirits, m a state between mortality and divinity, peaceful and favourable to man: he describes them zs, of different orders. The mortals who lived in the golden age have become daemons of the first rank; those of the silver age have inferior honours, and are mortal, although their life is prolonged to a length of many hundreds of human generations. The heroes form a still inferior cla of intermediate spirits. In popular language, when hero-worship became widely spread in Greece, the word hero and daemon were used without much distinction; but the more recondite difference appears to have been this, — the hero was the departed worthy himself, such as he had once lived on earth; the daemon was his immaterial part, converted into a sort of abstract principle, — a spiritual agent of good or evil, favourable or unfriendly to mankind. It.us in this sense also that the inferior deities themselves are designated as daemons. Thales is said to have defined more accurately the difference between gods, heroes as the souls of deceased mortals, and daemons properly so called; and in Plato's theology the daemons occupy an important place — as intermediate spirits, closely watching over, directing, and recording the actions of mortals. By later writers they were divided into many cla es: some ministers of punishment and revenge, some freeing from evils already befallen {Xv<noi), some warding off" their approach («A6|<xotxot), . It was in Egypt and Syria, under the Ptolemies and Seleucidae, that the Grecian philosophy and mythology came in contact with those of the Rabbis; and from that union a new mixed system of dae monology took its origin. Hence, in the Greek of the New Testament, the word dxtju-oviov is taken, without addition or qualification, as an evil spirit, and rendered by our translators " devil." Analogous to the daemons of the Greeks were the genii of the Romans; but there were peculiar and characteristic features about the belief in the latter which show it to be of a different origin, probably derived from tne Etruscans, who, as some antiquarians believe, drew their mythology from the ancient source of Samothrace. The genii of the Romans were an innumerable host of spirits: every man, house, or city had an attendant genius. The genius of every mortal is mortal as himself; accompanies him into life, and conducts him in all its vici itudes. In this sense, the genius was a favourable companion: to enjoy the good things of life is represented as " indulging" or gratifying the genius; abstaining from them, as '" defrauding" him. Wine and flowers are appropriate offerings to him. But he is also " vultu mutabilis, alb us et ater: " he is the companion of the mischances as well as the pleasures of life; unle , as the difficulty appears sometimes to have been solved, the individual had his pair of genii, good and bad. And this latter should appear to have been the popular belief among the Etruscans, as far as we can collect it, in a subject where all is vague and indistinct; and it is Impo ible accurately to separate the abstract creations of philosophers and poets from the substantive objects of general belief. The Etruscans represented the evil genius as a dark and frightful figure, attending a mortal on one side, %vho is protected or followed on the other by a child or youth — the usual emblem of the good genius. The genius is often represented on vases and in ancient paintings as a winged figure; and a genius holding a torch downwards is the emblem of death. The daemons of the middle ages were simply fallen angels or devils, according to the sense of the word in the New Testament; and hence demonology, in the language of modern writers, generally signifies the history of the supposed nature and properties of such evil spirits, and of the modern superstition respecting compacts between them and mankind. See Magic, Witchcraft. DEMONSTRATION (Lat. deraonstro, I show), was used by the old writers to signify " any manner of showing either the connection of a conclusion with its premises, or that of a phenomenon with the a erted cause; but it now means, in philosophical language, only that proce by which a result is shown to be a nece ary consequence of the premises from which it is a erted to follow, on the supposition that those premises are admitted, either as matter of fact, or of intuitive evidence, or of previous demonstration." Demonstration is also used in ordinary language as synonymous with joroQ/": thus it is often said that " evidence amounts to demonstration." Demonstrations, in a Military sense, are manoeuvres practised for the purpose of misleading the enemy. [s. 338]